Pursueth
About
eternally confounded
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Musings of the mind
Art remains in perpetual stasis. Where the artist and the audience grow and are endlessly subject to influence, changing, growing and eventually dying, art is the one thing that remains unmoved and unchanged by the passing of time. As such, art is a reflection of ourselves more than a reflection of itself. We cannot pertain an objective basis for art. This holds true for both the artist and the audience.
And so it begs the question about the meaning of scores and implication of objective metrics in our supposedly objective evaluations of one that is by nature, subjective. What is the purpose of this site, or any other site, where people come together and play pretend that they are the sole evaluator of art. We may argue that we do not believe in it but we sure act on it and sometimes even behave adamantly about these arbitrary scores and consensuses.
So should art be treated as a solely individual experience, something that should be divorced of communal discussions, stripped of any outside influence, so that it may only act as a direct mirror of ourselves. Like staring at an obscure painting in a museum. Most would of course, laugh and point at a piece by Picasso if we were by our friends, but if we were alone and isolated, would we still give the same reaction or stare endlessly as the piece revealed untouched ideas within ourselves? Should that be the basis of all art? The means to consume every art? Or is some art by nature a communal experience, by nature something that should reflect not our individual selves, but our fleeting communal conscience?
I do not know.
I have been thinking about this for ages. I did not always view art through the lens of the current consensus, instead it was always a gut feeling. "I like this" "I despise this" and it was never comparative. Every art revealed a different emotion to me, tickled a different nerve in my brain. But sites like these make it a comparative nightmare. Moreso for myself than the community. So at least from my experience, art can either be a expansion of emotions, a new spectrum of being or it can be a competitive brawl of "quality" where no one wins because there are no winners in art.
Humans are contradictory beings by nature. We eat to survive yet show sympathy towards the living. We condemn reprehensible acts yet find it entertaining to tune into it as an audience rather than a participant. So it bears scrutiny that art, a human expression at its very core, is also just as contradictory as its creator and observer.
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